Written for the William Burroughs conference, Paris, July 2009

by Eddie Woods

I picked up the phone the moment
it rang. It was Ira Cohen calling from New York. And (unusual for him back in
those late-80s days before all my money went down the drain) not reversing the charges. Didn’t even bother saying hello or
anything, instead went straight for the jugular.

“Thank God it’s not you!”

“What’s not me?” I asked.

“You’re not. You’re not Eddie
Woods. Had me worried for a moment.”

“What did?”

Since I am Eddie Woods, and had
already been close friends (yeah, we’ll go with that, never mind that we’ve had
more fallings-out than Carter has liver pills)...had been all too well
acquainted with Ira for more than a decade, you can perhaps appreciate my
confusion.

“It’s another Eddie Woods,” Ira
replied.

By then I was detecting relief
in his voice. Yet still decided to risk turning the anti-conversation we were
having into even more of an Abbott & Costello routine.

“Who is, Ira?” I said calmly.
“And what the fuck are you talking about anyway?”

He explained. Ira fashion.
Which is to say, speaking even more rapidly than I often do. Employing those
sonorous Ira tones that help project him as either the natural raconteur he is
or a headache in the making (i.e.yours), depending on whether his purpose is to
uplift-cum-educate you or launch a verbal assault. He’s a past master at both,
and those who have seen but one side of his personality coin are missing out on
experiencing the complete Ira. It’s kaleidoscopic, to say the least. As are his
unique photographs and frequently exquisite poems.

Anyway, the Ted Morgan bio, Literary
Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs,had just
appeared. And of course the first thing Ira did after obtaining a copy (I’ve no
idea how; though in the old days before bar codes and gotcha’ alarms at the
door, Ira invariably wore a very long and loose-fitting overcoat fitted with
numerous deep pockets when going, you know, ‘book shopping’)...his immediate
instinct was to swoop to the index and find his name. Five separate page
references; not too bad. Then leaf through the rest of the section to see who
else might be there. And more urgently, how many times.

‘What?! Woods, Eddie four times plus an extra double? Him six to my five; how can
that be? I introduced them, didn’t I?’ (Sure you did, Ira, same as you
introduced me to my own mother.) Whoosh, quickly flip to each of those pages
and find out why. Ahhh, salvation.

“So that’s that, it’s not you,”
a now utterly secure in his own skin & image Ira continued; “it’s some
other Eddie Woods, one of the two witnesses to the Joan shooting down in
Mexico. Did William ever mention him to you?”

So was this Eddie Woods, the present-party Eddie Woods, in there? He
wasn’t and isn’t. No real reason to be, especially considering the biography’s
timeframe. Not to mention that Ted M. didn’t then and still doesn’t know me
from Adam. Yo, a double bonus for my ol’ buddy Ice Cream Cohen. And hey, no big
deal. Same as William, I too can sometimes be an hombre invisible.

Soon enough any number of people
began mistaking me for this ‘other Eddie Woods.’ Even to the point of insisting
I was him, despite my protestations to the contrary. Including: I only met
William Burroughs in the flesh in 1978; didn’t get to start knowing him till a year later (to begin with during a long leisurely
Amsterdam stroll, just he and I, that found us discussing all manner of
things...from guns to his son Billy and Trungpa Rinpoche to the price of smack
and such); that with the single exception of an afternoon foray into Nogales in
the mid-1970s, I’d never been to Mexico, and certainly wasn’t there getting
involved in weird-ass gun deals with Bill Burroughs when I was only 11 years
old!

Still, people believe what they
want to believe. And that they were choosing to believe this somewhat reminded
me of the ‘Akbar del Piombo affair,’ as I like to think of it. How readers of
high-quality ‘naughty books’ became convinced that Akbar was a pseudonym for
William Burroughs. This thanks to Maurice Girodias, whose occasionally shady
business acumen led him to adorn the credits page of the first Olympia Press
edition of Cosimo’s Wife (“the best
porn novel ever,” according to Ira Cohen; and he’s right!) with a listing of
‘Other works by William S. Burroughs.’ In 1980, in New York, the real author,
the writer and dada-absurdist collage artist Norman Rubington, told me the
whole story and asked if I couldn’t please do something, anything, to finally
set the record straight. As well as passing the word, so to speak, I also
managed to get a horse’s-mouth handwritten ‘certification’ from the main man
himself, when some years later William inscribed my copy of Cosimo thus: I am not nor was ever meant to be Akbar del
Piombo. Norman did it! Inscribed the book
using a Bic pen, the kind William rather adamantly preferred. Case closed, for
posterity.

(Ah, that copy of Cosimo ought to be in my archive at Stanford University, in the
Norman Rubington/Akbar del Piombo file. But I’m afraid it’s one of the few
thousand volumes ‘I ate’ after going broke. Sold it to the same second-hand
bookshop that also got (for a pittance) my triple-signed first edition of Minutes
to Go, a particularly precious gem that
when I last checked on the internet was going for a mere—wait for
it—33,000+ dollars! Tja, win some, lose some.)

Back to Eddie Woods. I could’ve
written William to ask... But ask what? That he interrupt his more important
endeavors (his painting, his writing, his meditations) in order to indulge my
more or less idle curiosity concerning a recently-discovered older namesake?
Naw, stuff like that is best saved for one-on-one chatting about. And lo and
behold, precisely such an opportunity knocked, grandly so, in September of
1993. When as part of a long and immensely entertaining William Burroughs
Tribute evening at Amsterdam’s premier multi-media center, de Melkweg (or Milky
Way), Udo Breger and I spoke directly with William via a special telephone
hookup with Lawrence, Kansas. An exchange everyone in the audience could hear;
and that for years afterwards others might listen to, compliments of the video
recording that was made of the entire event.

[speaking like Burroughs] No,
it’s not you (came the reply to my having
inquired whether William could maybe elaborate a bit on this chap so many
people were convinced was me). Blond. Short, not so short, about 5-8; kind
of muscular. Nice guy. He liked to talk, liked to argue, but he was never
violent. Grey eyes. He’s still alive, think he’s in California somewhere. Yes,
I saw quite a lot of him. Matter laid to
rest, permanently. Now the only remaining Eddie Woodses I need to distance
myself from, Google and Wikipedia-wise, are this horse trainer dude in Florida,
some song lyricist whom I’m beginning to suspect of having purloined my name;
and above all the movie actor whose career pretty much nose-dived after James
Cagney was made to swap roles with him in the classic 1931 gangster film The
Public Enemy. Oy, that other EW, the one
without an s at the end of his surname, the world’s worst-ever director,
immortalized by Johnny Depp in the film Ed Wood...he ain’t me either!

The William anecdotes can go on
and on. Some I’ve written about, others I eventually will. Enshallah. Like the time William broke up what looked to be heading
for a fist fight between me and my gopher Tom, out in the street in front of
the old Ins & Outs building, just as William was leaving after having
visited for several hours. Now there, boys, no need to get all hot under the
collar. Go back inside and cool down, he
said, while stepping between and physically separating us. Or some minutes
earlier when one of my dearer lady friends, Corry, seeing that William was
having difficulty donning his outdoor wraps (it really had been a long
afternoon and evening), went over to him saying: “That’s not the way to get a
coat on.” And then proceeded to first take Bill apart and then put him back
together. A gentle act for which he was clearly grateful. And a fleeting
occurrence that those who are under the mistaken impression that William S.
Burroughs was a misogynist would do well to bear in mind.

William signed and inscribed a
lot of books that day, among them one (I forget which) to my cuddly stuffed
animal (soft toys, the British call them) with the deerstalker cap and
magnifying glass: To Bearlock Holmes, who sees all and knows something.
William Burroughs.

“My, but is Bill ever a signing
fool today,” joked James Grauerholz. Either before or after setting a mirror
(or more probably a giant slab of agate) embellished with lines of coke in
front of him.

What’s this? asked William.

“Uptown,” James replied.

William shook his head. With
which I handed a small wad of cash to gopher Tom and sent him out to score
some...’downtown.’

Tom. The only person in the
room (my office, actually), and there were a dozen or so of us there, who
couldn’t get beyond addressing William as Mr. Burroughs.

‘Huh?’ I thought, overhearing
what was bound to be an intriguing albeit exceptionally short-lived
tźte-ą-tźte.

Yes, William responded.

“For what?” said Tom innocently
(some achievement, come to think of it; for a former wartime soldier and
ex-live show performer), thereby sticking his head all the way into the lion’s
jaw.

Murder!

Gulp.

So there you have slices of the up
close and personal William I came to know. And then we have Burroughs the
writer, the one everyone should know. If they know what’s good for them, that
is. Did I, as Ira Cohen claims to have done, read Naked Lunch seven times and then go back for more? No. Twice plus the
Cronenberg film did the trick for me. While it’s no secret (to those with whom
I’ve discussed William’s books) that I lean toward the straighter writings as
opposed to the cut-ups. With Junkie and
Queer being especial favorites. That
said, I have nonetheless been influenced to some extent by the concept of cut-up. After my own fashion. And it’s an example of
this with which I should like to close. A ‘mind cut-up.’ Composed years ago in
collaboration with the Australian writer & musician Gideon Chalmers
and...you guessed, Ira Cohen. It ran as an editorial in the second issue of Ins
& Outs magazine and is entitled Top
Secret.

TOP SECRET

It is a widely held misconception
that there are such things as facts. This vicious rumor has been perpetrated by
the mechanical saints, winged messengers of the Wiesbaden Computer. The purpose
of this disquisition, entertainment aside, is to provide an alternative set of
variables. Witness Vermeer and his utilization of magnetic tape, glowworm of
the Sun King. Witness again Rembrandt and his own critical involvement with the
Wiesbaden Computer.

Armies of the night are on the
move, searching for a final resting place.

Shadowed by the Taunus Mountains,
neo-Nazi demonstrators—recruited from the ranks of unemployed bit
actors—assemble in dawn light before the main programming complex in
Wiesbaden, demanding that no machine, armed or unarmed, have the right to
purchase property. GASTARBEITERS DEMAND MORE MUSHROOMS AND PERMANENT VIDEO
CONSOLATION.

Meanwhile, several hundred
miles to the south, an artificial tapeworm disguised as Danny La Rue drives at
breakneck speed to deliver flowers for Aldo Moro's empty module container. In
such circumstances a superior man will hesitate before performing miracles over
the telephone. After all, it might well be bugged.

Now let us look at the
anti-facts. Two unidentified individuals, clairvoyantly sighted on the road to
Wiesbaden carrying time-bound modulators on their arched backs, are in fact
deserters from the Limelight script.
Proof of this, as well as other premonitions, is slowly crystallizing in the
bleeding memory bank, a martyred mirage of the relevant time sequence. Insert
Rembrandt and the Wiesbaden Computer, module two.

Immediately upon receiving this
information, the liquid perceptions of our assigned investigators (agents
Chalmers, Cohen and Woods) were attracted to an image of the fleeing comedians,
Messrs. Chaplin and Hitler. According to the fundamental reality of the
paranoid state, the proposed belief system was instantly brought into action as
an essential counter-defense maneuver to the lobotomized condition in which
Europe now finds itself. What is needed, however, is more than a new set of
proposals. A new dignity is required, as well. This, then, is a schedule for an
act of mercy.

Predawn procedure. Warm-up
motor of an imaginary vehicle running at 12,000 revs per cosmic second. Blue
flashing relays of the outcast overmind arrive to restore the peace. The
awaited signal for the Autobahn Ballet. A little fear goes a long way.

And now, with but 21 years
remaining until the Nostradamus debacle, we can do no better (and certainly no
worse) than to advise you in the incorruptible words of the mild-mannered guru
of Igatpuri: Having meditated quietly from the base of your own mind, please...take
rest, take rest, take rest.

EDDIE WOODS was born in New York City in 1940.
At age 20, facing the draft and not wanting to get his fingernails dirty, he joined the US Air Force for a 4-year stint, spent mostly in Germany.
He subsequently lived and traveled in divers parts of Europe, North Africa and both the near & farther East, additionally crisscrossing much of the United States twice.
After residing for two decades in Amsterdam (where he edited an international features magazine, ran a small English-language literary press, and was a contributing editor for the London-based underground newspaper International Times), he moved to England for the third time, passing six years in a remote corner of the Devonshire countryside until returning to Holland in the autumn of 2004.